Social networking platforms and networks, including, e.g., FACEBOOK, GOOGLE+, LINKEDIN, TWITTER, YOUTUBE, XING, and many others, are commonly employed by millions of users. They have become so pervasive that they are now commonly used even by organizations and other commercial enterprises to advertise as well as communicate with their target audiences on behalf of the organizations. (The social networking platforms named in this application may be registered or common law trademarks of entities unrelated to the applicant. Applicant makes no claim of ownership over any such trademarks.)
A social account (or simply “account”) is an account on one or more social networking platforms (“social network”). An account can be associated with an individual (e.g., a natural person) or it can be associated with an organization (e.g., created by an employee of the organization) for broadcasting information about the organization or its products or services. Creating accounts on these social networks is relatively simple and users can create a “presence” on the social networks for themselves, their products, their brands and/or their initiatives. To present a consistent social identity across social networking platforms, individuals and organizations can create a social account on each social networking platform using similar or identical names, pictures and descriptions. The individual or organization can then broadcast similar or identical content across multiple or even all of their social accounts to reach the audiences or constituents on each social networking platform to which they are connected.
Similarly, an individual or organization can create multiple social accounts on the same social networking platform to represent different products or “personas.” Even though these social accounts may appear to be different, the same person or representative of a company or other entity can control, configure and post content using these accounts.
Individuals or companies attempting to engage in “bad” activity (“fraudulent users”) on a social networking platform can attempt to evade detection by creating multiple social accounts (“fake social accounts”) on this social networking platform that appear to represent non-malicious or real-world identities. Examples of bad activity include, e.g., violating social networking platforms' rules regarding terms of use, abusive online behavior, violating laws, etc. These malicious individuals or companies can then interact with legitimate social accounts on social networking platforms via one or more of these fake social accounts with malicious intent, e.g., abusing, bullying, exploiting, harming, infecting (e.g., with malware or viruses), or stealing from the legitimate social accounts.
To operate at a high scale, these fraudulent users may write software programs, commonly called “bots”, that automate the creation of multiple social accounts and the publishing of social content using those accounts. This technique is most often used to spread to legitimate social users spam, malware, or other abusive or malicious content, who then may read or potentially act upon the content.
Social networks generally have programmatic application program interfaces (APIs) that enable third party applications (“social applications” or simply “applications”) to integrate with the social networks and provide additional services for the social networks' users. Through these APIs, social networks provide additional services for the social network's users. These APIs provide access to public data within the social network. Access to private data may also be allowed if it is granted by the social account that owns that data.